The National Science Foundation's Materials Research Science and Engineering Center Program Book

Book Review- Genetic Engineering
By Ben Ropiak

The Debate about Genetic Engineering is a very factual book and I reccomend it to any person, but mostly people in the field or who are inerested in science. This book is an eye opening realization that science has made great strides in the last couple of years.

The author writes this book based lots of facts. There is always something new on every page and is full of interesting mind expanding facts. This book includes the non fiction traits of blurbs, captions, pictures, graphs, glossaries, indexes and more. I found the most interesting part of the book to be when I found out that scientests recently tried and suceeded to clone a goat. In the book the author explains the eye popping technology and science that goes into cloning just one goat. In the book they talk about using this cloning technique on endangered species to protect their ability to remain a species. As you can see, this is not your normal 50 page non fiction book be done in 2 days, it takes alot of time for you to digest all of these cool pieces of information!

While reading through the book, I discovered there are strong opinions from the negative and positive side about cloning. The author did a great job mentioning both sides of the discussion. The people who said cloning would have a negative impact said that the cloning being done to the certain animal could be harmful to the animals well being and possibly alter the genetic mutation. By saying it could be harmful to the animal, that would be considered harrasment towards the animal and tampering with the species, which is a much more severe and less likely side to it. The group of people who say it has a positive impact too have strong opinions. Imagine if there were only 50 kinds of a species left, and you had acess to one, by cloning or geneticlly engineering it, you could over time increase the amount of species especially if a female. The people who say it will be good to do this mentions the well being of the species, which is ironic because the opposing groups think the exact opposite.

In conclusion, this book is full of riveting information to turn you brain on and expand it. If you are into animals, science, or the what I found out about reading this book, cloning. Remember, this book is not for everybody. If you enjoy a easy read of light facts along the way, this book is not for you. However, if you want to take the time to sit down and learn, I would reccomend this book to anyone who asks me.